The first step is to find a moderately obscure topic you would know far more about than your average English grad would. It can be anything: something related to your career, a hobby you’re deep into, your religion, an academic area you’ve studied extensively, or even pastel ponies. Choose something of which you have a deep knowledge.

Having chosen your topic, look for articles in the mainstream news on the topic. Try the big ones: CNN, the NYT, the Washington Post, or, in Canada, the CBC. Having found a few articles from a few different sources read them.

Notice every time they are inaccurate, make a factual mistake, leave out something important, make a logical fallacy, write something that doesn’t make sense, or otherwise distort reality.

Having done this, think on the fact that every other topic covered by the media has errors to the same extent, except you don’t notice because you don’t know more about that topic than your average J-school graduate.

Then consider how you, and most everybody else, becomes informed about things they don’t know of.

This is where the horror sets in.

****

To let the horror creep in more, look to your career. Remember that obscure regulation nobody outside your particular occupation or industry would know of, the one that: made society worse, was borderline insane, the government had no business being in, allowed a person/company to rob the taxpayer, made your job more miserable than it should be, and/or was just pointless busywork to employ bureaucrats?

You probably never talked of it to anyone other than possibly the occasional rant to a friend or two or some co-workers.

Now think on the fact that there are thousands of other occupations and industries you are not employed in and where you would not be able to know that obscure regulation.

I’m a little late on the bandwagon, so by now you’ve probably heard that Phil Robertson was suspended by A&E from the reality show, Duck Dynasty for some comments made during an interview with GQ. I made a smallseries of tweets when I first came across the event.

This event is significant because it is the first time the brown scare has impacted a particular person this well known to the mainstream. Sure, Watson, Dickenson, Summers, Richwine, Derbyshire, et al. were victims of the witchhunt, but none of those names are ones the average Joe on the street would rcognize. Sure, Chic-Fil-A was persecuted, but its a faceless corporation; who’s ever heard of Dan Cathy?

But Duck Dynasty is huge and Phil Robertson is a recognizable individual. It’s the most-watched nonfiction show of all time and A&E’s highest rated show fo all time. He is somebody your average middle-American knows and likes.

The culture war has been raging for a while, but mostly in words and on the political level. Phil shows the red states, the vaisyas, how far the the progressives are willing to go to enforce ideological conformity. It shows how much the elites truly do detest middle America. It makes the culture war personal by showing that they’re ready and willing to not just denounce you, but to steal your livelihood simply for speaking what you think.

Now that the working-to-middle class whites now have a sampling of the elites hatred towards them, hopefully they will see the class war being waged against them.

For hate is the only explanation* for this: Duck Dynasty is insanely profitable and popular for a second-rate cable network previously best known for Law and Order reruns. There is absolutely no business reason to mess with a formula that works. Any fool can see that the 77% of America that are Christian vastly outnumber the <4% of America that is gay.

The cultural elites hate the conservative low-to-middle class whites that are the primary consumers of the show and they hate the Christian morality and traditional family structures the show portrays.

They wish to destroy these whites, their lifestyle, and their morality.

Oh, how the elites at A&E must rue how their attempt to mock the rednecks has backfired. I would have loved to see their faces when they realized their laugh-at-the-rednecks show become popular for all the ‘wrong’ reasons. It’s Archie Bunker all over again.

In a cultural wasteland of “reality” programming showcasing degenerates, freaks, perverts, broken homes, blackened souls, and empty, twisted hearts, Duck Dynasty focuses on a normal, functional, loving family holding to a solid moral framework and enjoying their lives. It presents a cultural alternative to the broken, empty world the cultural elites are trying to force onto the masses.

Whatever our opinions of TV, the simple fact is most Americans are consumers of TV. Duck Dynasty is one of the few shows to show working-class whites, Christianity, and traditional morality in a positive light and it is one of the few that gives the masses something moral and uplifting.

For this Duck Dynasty and Phil Robertson deserves support.

*There is a very small chance this was a publicity stunt by A&E. I don’t think its likely, but you never know.

Dalrock has already pointed out the moral problems with the ad, I’m going to focus the advertisement aspects. Dalrock argues that the ad is aimed at churchian feminist woman, and I agree because otherwise, the proponents of marriage suck at advertising.

Instead of making marriage look like something men would want to pursue and would be willing to sacrifice for, they make it look horrible.

In the little skit in the middle, the man is the thoroughly henpecked, seemingly unhappy husband of a fat, dumpy, controlling wife. He’s so thoroughly beaten down that he’s afraid to have a little masculine bonding time with his son, with the video implying that there’s something wrong with him wanting to do so.

Watching this, my main thought was”is this really how they want to advertise marriage to men?”

I’m lean more towards the more pro-marriage part of the manosphere, but this would drive me away from marriage more than any other possible effect it could have. What kind of man would desire to become that husband?

What young man could possibly watch that and say, “yeah, I want to man-up and marry so I too can be a the ball-less husband of an ugly, dominating shrew who’s afraid to play pool with his son.”

C’mon guys. If you want men to man-up and marry how about making marriage look good? How about making marriage seem like a rewarding experience?

In fact, I’ll give you guys an awesome marketing campaign. A marketing idea this good would generally cost thousands of dollars from a slick New York agency, but I’ll give it to you for free because I love western civilization and we need working marriages to keep the remnant chugging.

Here’s my ad campaign for a man-up series:

It starts with an average-looking man in a suit, someone most guys could identify with, coming home from a day at the office. He looks kind of worn-out and stressed. He parks his car, sighs a bit, then walks up to his house. He opens the door.

The first thing seen when the door opens is his non-offensively pretty wife dressed femininely. She looks up from working in the kitchen and sees he’s stressed, so she comes up to him with a smile on her face and gives him a hug and quick kiss on the lips. She takes his bag and says, “Dinner is almost ready, why don’t you sit down?” He gets into his recliner and leans back, his stress visibly fading away. She joyfully brings him a small plate of freshly made cookies and some milk. He thanks her with an expression of mingled gratitude and relief and takes the cookie. While he snacks she says, “How about later…” and bends over and whispers something in his ear while brushing her hand up his leg. The man responds with a large, expectant smile.

Cut to her calling out that dinner is ready. The man goes to the table to find a delicious home-cooked meal of steak and potatoes, his cute, happy children run up to the table. His wife wipes the dirt smudges off of one of the rascals as they sit down. The man looks on proudly as he sits at the head of the table. His wife sits to his right. She looks at him with an expectant smile, her hand on his arm, and he proudly says grace for the family.

During the prayer fade to black and end with the tagline: Worth being a man for.

Boom. I’d want buy that product. I don’t know a man who wouldn’t.

I’d happily man-up to come home to that; I’d happily work 70 hour weeks to come home to that; I would happily sacrifice quite a bit to come home to that. So, would most men. Most men would willingly sacrifice their left nut for that.

So, some marketing advice to Mr. Driscoll. If you want men to man-up and marry, make marriage seem like something rewarding for men.

McDonald’s doesn’t sell cheeseburgers by having a fat, ugly man eat them in his dingy basement while playing WoW and sobbing to himself. They sell cheeseburgers by showing groups of realistically attractive people having fun together while eating cheeseburgers.

Likewise, you don’t make men desire to man-up and marry by showing marriage as a demasculating process of having your pride, virility, and freedom slowly drained from you by an ugly, domineering shrew. You make men want to get married by showing marriage as a refuge from the cares of the world occupied by a pretty, loving, nurturing woman.

Then again, my campaign might be false advertising for most men. Driscoll might get sued.

This week I was reminded why I don’t have cable. I went on a two-evening business trip and was planning to do some reading in the evenings; I wanted to finish Economics in One Lesson and possibly Boston’s Gun Bible. I ended only getting most of the way through the former.

Why?

Both evenings, when I got back to the hotel room, I turned on the TV for what I planned to be a little relaxation before starting reading. The planned half hour, turned into an entire night. (I should have learned the first night, but didn’t).

Some of it I enjoyed, Duck Dynasty was very entertaining and filled with solid moral lessons; I do not regret watching a few episodes and wanting to watch a couple more was the reason I turned the TV on the second night. But in addition to Duck Dynasty, I ended up watching, among other shows, a multi-hour marathon of those storage auction shows, the movie Hook (which had a certain nostalgia value, but little else), and a few episodes of some retarded Nickelodeon comedy for teenagers, none of which I can say I actually enjoyed watching.

I’m fairly sure my books would have been not only more edifying, but also more entertaining, definitely moreso than the Nickoledean comedy. Yet, I watched these shows anyway.

I had this same problem back when I did have cable. It was so easy to sit down, then continue wasting away time even when I wasn’t enjoying myself or what I was watching. I would spend 15 minutes flipping through the channels, thinking to myself there’s nothing on. Then, thinking if I wait only 15 more minutes, new shows I like will be on. I could occasionally spend hours in this cycle of non-enjoyment

TV is manufactured to pulls at your senses and suck you in. After it sucks you in, it drains your energy and will to do anything else. The passivity of TV makes it unlike any other medium. Print require active reading, video games require active involvement, but TV requires nothing other than to lie down a shut up. It is so very easy to waste large amounts of time not enjoying yourself watching TV.

Cable makes it worse. With so much variety, it is always easy to find a show that is, if not entertaining, is barely watchable. It’s such a low threshold to reach, but the primal pull of the colours, the movement, the sound, the manufactured ‘relationships’, the ‘overheard’ conversation makes it difficult to resist the lure of the barely watchable. You are being manipulated on levels you are barely aware of; I was.

Cable TV is a soul-sucking distraction.

We could even say, it leaves you desouled, butthexed, and bernankified. lolzlollzozlolz

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.

Is there any better expression of the compulsion to watch TV than that: “I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”

Can you think of anything worse to think to yourself at the end of your life? I can’t.

****

Now, this is not a blanket condemnation of TV; man should have some leisure and relaxation and some shows are genuinely worth watching even absent the entertainment value (I put Yes, Minister on the DE Reading List for a reason). But you should only watch, in moderation, what you actually enjoy or what may inform you or make you a better person.

Spending hours watching commercial-filled crap which meets the minimal requirement of not completely unwatchable simply because it pulls at at your laziness and other primal compulsions you don’t quite understand is a waste.

My advice, if you have cable or satellite TV get rid of it. If there’s a specific show you want to watch, stream it on Netflix or get the DVD’s, but having cable makes it far to easy to get sucked into a time-wasting vortex where you are neither entertained nor doing anything productive.

I’m almost glad I had that experience at the hotel, it reminded me of the cold dead fire. It reminded me of the dangers of cable and why I decided against it in the first place. It’s a lifeless, joyless way to waste your life.

I don’t listen to the radio anymore, the only TV I have is Netflix, and I don’t read newspapers anymore except when linked to from some blog, so I’m fairly disconnected from the standard news. This weekend I was on a cart trip with some friends and we were listening to the CBC (the state-run broadcaster) and I realized exactly how deep the red pill has sunk into my thinking. Three particular items stood out.

The first was some news story about the protests in Turkey. The CBC was very much in favour of the protestors. The story was all about how oppressed the environmentalists, gays, and democrats protesting the regime were and how controlling the regime was for oppressing the greens and gays. They never got the side of the government or the majority of Turks who supported the government. Rather than supporting the protestors, I remarked how one-sided and biased the story was to my friends and found myself supporting the regime, simply based on how biased the CBC was on the issue. A few years ago I would hardly have noticed.

A little later a “debate” occurred concerning women’s declining fertility with age and when women should get married. One guest was against women marrying young so they could experience the world and be happy, the other was for women marrying young so they could find somebody and be happy. My friend remarked, ‘see, they cover both sides’. Then, red pill knowledge firmly in place, I told him how it didn’t both were the same liberal side concerned with happiness being the sole goal of marriage. Not a person addressed duty to family, God, or the nation, no one even mentioned are below-replacement reproductive rates, no one mentioned the health of the family or the country, no one mentioned the religious or societal foundations of marriage. Both women had the exact same argument: women should marry to be happy and no one should judge them for that, the only difference was at what age marriage would be the happiest. My friend then told me, they were never going to have that kind of debate on the radio; I told him that was exactly my point about the one-sidedness of it all.

Finally, a story about Nelson Mandela’s failing health came on. I was amazed by the almost painful cognitive dissonance of it. The whole story was about two things: 1) Nelson Mandela has been a foundational symbol of post-apartheid South Africa and his loss will greatly hurt the country, and 2) South Africa is in horrible shape, corruption is out of control, and it has been continually getting worse with people agitating to undo land reforms, etc., which is why the nation needs the symbolism of Mandela to hold itself together. The fact that this continual decline was a result of the regime Mandela helped put into place was enver even remarked on, even thought the entire story screamed this fact between the lines.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have noticed any of this. The red pill is a strong drug.